


a murder of crows

by aesthetically



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: M/M, bruce is playing with fire here, fuck it everyone is gay, jonathan calls bruce baby because other fics for the ship SAID SO, jonathan is head over heels, set during the early days of no man's land i guess, so i figured i would contribute, there's not NEARLY enough scarebat content, very horny content, wayleska is only mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-11
Updated: 2020-05-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:40:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24122260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aesthetically/pseuds/aesthetically
Summary: He’d expected Bruce Wayne to flee from Gotham, tail tucked between his legs like the rest of those who could afford it.Oh, and how wrong he was.
Relationships: Jeremiah Valeska/Bruce Wayne, Jonathan Crane/Bruce Wayne
Comments: 7
Kudos: 101





	a murder of crows

Scarecrow didn’t understand the fuss about Bruce Wayne.

Jerome and Jeremiah both had been hellbent on having him, but it was easy to attribute obsession to madness. Or to morbid sibling rivalry. Whichever. 

Crane didn’t really care. 

To him, Bruce Wayne was a photograph on the television he’d seen his father watching all those years ago. The perfect poster child for tragedy. Poor little orphan boy, with all the money in the world to help him wipe away his tears. 

(Jonathan had been orphaned by tragedy too, but no one cared about that, did they? No one mourned _his_ losses on cable TV. Jim Gordon didn’t come back for _him_ when he needed him most.) 

He hadn’t anticipated their paths crossing anytime soon. In fact, he hadn’t anticipated them crossing at _all_ with everything as it was now—Crane thought the glimpse he’d caught of him on camera at 71 Welling Avenue would be the last so long as Jeremiah’s plan played out, and that was that. 

He’d expected Bruce Wayne to flee from Gotham, tail tucked between his legs like the rest of those who could afford it.

Oh, and how wrong he was. 

He’d heard of _someone_ skulking around in the shadows of the Dark Zone seeking out Jeremiah, but to discover it was Bruce Wayne himself—now _that_ was interesting. Perhaps he had misjudged him.

Perhaps the Valeskas weren’t so misplaced in their fixation after all. 

Crane is further from his territory than he should be—but he can’t help himself. He wants to see what Bruce looks like up close, in the flesh. Wants to know what he looks like when he’s _scared._

“I know someone’s there,” Bruce suddenly says, his voice low, quiet.

Scarecrow’s heart skips a beat. 

It’s a strange feeling—it’s almost like _fear_ , he thinks, his hands a little sweaty under the burlap of his suit, his pulse quickening as he sees Bruce draw nearer and nearer. 

But it isn’t fear at all. It’s anticipation.

Excitement. 

Or maybe they’re the same thing. 

Scarecrow just knows that he likes it.

He likes how gracefully Bruce moves through shadows with only moonlight to guide him. Likes how grim and hard and _dangerous_ the glint in his eyes is, likes that he looks like he’s been cut from marble. 

“I said I _know_ —”

Scarecrow doesn’t need him to say it again.

He rushes at him with the staff of his scythe, and Bruce’s eyes widen in surprise as he realizes what’s happening. 

Bruce ducks before Crane can pin him. 

“Scarecrow,” he says, a little breathless, maybe even a little _confused_ , but any other indication of emotion is gone from his face. 

It’s almost _impressive_ , how unreadable and unafraid Bruce is in the face of fear itself—but Crane thinks he can rectify that. 

“You’re a long way from the Green Zone.” Scarecrow lunges forward with his scythe. Bruce avoids him with relative ease, his lips pulled taut in an unamused line. 

“What do you want?” 

Another swing. Bruce ducks beneath it and behind Crane before slamming him forward into the wall of the alley. Crane is admittedly caught off guard. 

He permits himself a small smile under his mask before snapping back around. 

“It gets awfully lonely in the dark, doesn’t it,” he croons. “Is that why you’re looking for Jeremiah?”

Bruce’s face finally reveals something other than cool indifference at the mention of the lunatic, his jaw tightening, his eyes narrowed— _contempt suits him_ , Crane thinks.

“You know where he is,” the teen says, and the desperation in his voice is tangible. 

Crane takes this moment of weakness to force Bruce against the wall, the blade of his scythe pressed delicately at Bruce’s Adam's apple. 

“If I did, what would you do?”

“I’m not here to play games.” 

“Good thing you’re not the one with the upper hand here,” Crane taunts. 

He knows he could spray him like this, watch his pretty face contort with fear—eyes wide, lips trembling. 

He wonders if he’s a screamer. If he’s a crier. If he’s both. 

Wonders if he’s as impenetrable as he seems.

But Crane resists himself. Scaring Bruce would hardly be worth it without a little foreplay, after all. Without figuring out what makes him tick. 

He leans in close enough that they’re breathing the same air, but Bruce doesn’t budge. 

“Go on,” Bruce says, impatient. “Spray me. Kill me.” 

“Eager, aren’t we?” He lowers the blade from Bruce’s chin, and Bruce exhales sharply. “I asked you a question before you decided to get smart.”

“I would ask you where he is.”

“And if I wouldn’t tell?”

“I would make you tell me,” Bruce hisses through his teeth, glowering, irritated. 

“I’m not sure what you think you’re going to do if you find him.”

“I’ll arrest him.”

Crane wants to _laugh_ at how earnest Bruce is. How sweet. How noble. How very _Jim Gordon_. 

It seems a direct contradiction to that dark, forbidding look he harbors in his eyes. The one he’s trying so hard to hide. 

“That’ll stop him.”

“It’s justice,” Bruce says, a little more hotly now.

“I heard about what he did to your friend. Would she call it that?”

“ _Don’t_.” Bruce’s lips curl into a half-snarl, and Crane wants to bask in the cruelty of that look, wants to wrap himself up in that trembling, seething rage Bruce has boiling right beneath the surface. 

“Is it because you can’t do what’s needed to be done?” Crane presses. “Or is it because you’re _scared_ that you can?”

Bruce suddenly wraps his hands around the scythe and pushes back with all the force he can muster. Crane stumbles backwards before Bruce kicks him square in the chest, able to wrangle the blade from his grip completely before letting it clatter to the ground as well. 

It’s a hard impact. Crane doesn’t know if his ribcage or head hurts more, but he doesn’t have much time to think about it before Bruce Wayne is on top of him, half-crouching, half-kneeling. Just as Crane thinks it, Bruce has the hand he would've sprayed him with pinned under his own, forcing whatever toxin left in the contraption to disperse uselessly into nothing. 

“Don’t tell me you’re holding back on me,” Crane rasps. “You can be _rough_. I want to know what you’d do to Jeremiah.”

Bruce looks at him like he’s the sole object of his animosity, eyes wide, nostrils flared—his cheeks _pink_ , Crane swears. He curls a hand tightly into the front of his burlap suit, half raising Crane’s head from the ground. “So you want to be arrested, then.”

“I’m not talking about that, baby. I mean what you _really_ want—”

Crane’s head meets the floor once again. He grits his teeth in pain, in anticipation as Bruce’s other hand comes up from his pinned-down one. But Bruce doesn’t swing. Doesn’t knock him out like he should.

Instead, he pulls off Crane’s mask. 

(Jonathan remembers the last time someone had seen him without it. Jerome procured him his new suit, and he _had_ to remove the Arkham-made one in front of him, had to apply the black shadows around his eyes so the skin wouldn’t be visible under the new mask with Jerome watching gleefully. “Aren’t _you_ a sight for sore eyes? Oh, I wish Tetch was here for this. Here I was, thinking you were some type of _elephant man_ under the mask. But look at all that _hair_!”) 

Bruce’s gaze softens upon seeing him. Crane knows it’s because Bruce wasn’t expecting him to be so young. Wasn’t expecting something so disgustingly _human_. 

He feels pitiful like this. Bare to him. 

But now Crane knows he can exploit it. 

“I guess your parents died before they could teach you it’s rude to stare.”

“Shut. _Up_.” If Bruce was attempting to conceal his anger, he wasn’t doing a good job of it anymore—Crane could feel him practically shaking on top of him. “Just _shut up_.”

“Only if you make me.”

Crane sits up a little, and he feels Bruce’s grip on his collar get tighter—but he doesn’t stop him. Doesn’t force him to stay on his back. 

They’re close, much closer than they should be—if anyone were to see them, Crane is sure it would look funny. Not that he cares, anyway. He can only focus on Bruce. 

He notices how smooth his skin is. The delicate slope of his nose. Those lips, pursed in a perpetual pout. 

Bruce’s eyes follow his own. Knows what Crane is staring at. 

There’s something _thick_ in the air between them, and Crane knows he’s not imagining it. 

“Well,” he says in a voice low enough for only Bruce to hear, “aren’t you going to _do_ something?”

“I could knock you out and leave you here.” Bruce says this nonchalantly, moving to straddle Crane properly now, both knees on either side of him. “I _should_ do that,” he corrects himself. 

“Scared of what’s going to happen if you don’t, baby?”

“You talk too much.”

Bruce’s hand—the one not holding his suit—tangles itself in Crane’s hair suddenly, yanking his neck back into an arch before closing the distance between their lips.

The kiss is far from tender. It’s all teeth and tongue and pent-up aggression that had just been _begging_ to be released. Bruce’s lips are soft ( _so, so soft_ , Crane thinks, _even better than they look_ ), but they’re pressed hard against his open mouth, desperate and hungry. Bruce kisses him like he wants to consume him, and Crane will let him if that’s what it takes to crawl under his skin and stay there. 

Crane bites Bruce’s lip hard enough to draw blood, and the precious, strangled noise Bruce tries to hold back from making sends a wave of wanton heat down into the pit of his stomach. 

The hand in Crane’s hair pulls so hard that he can’t help but groan into this kiss, and Bruce forces his wet, hot tongue past parted lips, diligently exploring every corner of Crane’s mouth as if he wants to memorize it. 

Crane bucks his hips up against Bruce’s, desperate for friction, and to his pleasure, Bruce grinds back against him with an equal amount of fervency. To know Bruce wants this, _needs_ this as badly as Crane does—it’s enough to drive him mad with desire. 

So when Bruce tears himself away from the kiss, panting like he’s just run a marathon, Crane feels like his entire body has been set ablaze. 

Bruce is truly something to behold now: his lips are slick with blood and saliva, swollen and red, his dark eyes glazed over. Scarecrow has no more clever words or quips—he just wants _more_. 

“I like you like this,” Bruce says, confident, cocksure. He releases Crane from his grasp.

“Don’t tell me you’re _leaving_ me like this, baby,” he nearly whines as Bruce gets off of him, wiping his mouth of blood. 

“I want to know where Jeremiah is,” he says simply. Something primal bursts in Crane’s chest. 

“If you were thinking about that _lunatic_ during all of that—”

“I want you to help me.”

Crane laughs not at the fact that Bruce wants to weaponize his attraction to him, but the fact that he’ll _let him_.

(He _knows_ it’s not all for play, even if Bruce has convinced himself it is—he knows you can’t fake that kind of chemistry.)

“You certainly drive a hard bargain.”

“Meet me back here in a week.”

And just like that, Bruce is gone. 

Crane supposes he should get to work if he doesn’t want to come back empty-handed.

**Author's Note:**

> hopefully it's not too painfully obvious i'm more of a screenplay writer than a prose one. and shoutout to like. the 5 other scarebat fics that exist for gotham !!!
> 
> i want to write another part for this, but we'll see what happens lmao
> 
> hope you enjoyed!


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